The Templar Legion t-5

by Paul Christopher

  Euhler didn’t even blink.

  “Are these individual clients or are they willing to invest as a cartel?”

  “Whichever is most beneficial,” said Saint-Sylvestre. He was making it as easy as possible for the round-faced Euhler to take the bait. It was time to add the icing to the cake.

  “If your bank works out for these clients, then perhaps we could discuss further business. We have a number of clients in similar situations who could benefit from a broader investment profile.”

  “This sounds extremely interesting, Mr. Ben Barka.” Euhler nodded. “Perhaps we could discuss it further over dinner tonight.”

  “That would be most pleasant,” said Saint-Sylvestre. “And please, call me Tarik.”

  “And I am Leonhard.” The banker smiled. “But my friends call me Lenny.” He opened a drawer in the desk, took out a card and used an expensive-looking fountain pen to scribble on it.

  “I meet few men of culture in my work,” said Saint-Sylvestre, sighing as he dangled the carrot. “Certainly not ones who can recite Yeats from memory.”

  “As I mentioned, he is a favorite of mine. I wrote several essays about him over the years at school.”

  “A prescient man,” said Saint-Sylvestre. “In parts of Africa he would be thought of as a griot, a shaman, a foreteller of the future.”

  “A role which seems to fall to bankers now.” Euhler laughed with a strange, strangled sound that was almost a giggle. He smiled again. “Perhaps you would like dinner tonight and we can discuss it?”

  Saint-Sylvestre smiled. The banker was definitely wooing him. “That sounds very pleasant.”

  “There is a place nearby. Very modern. The Krone. The Crown. They do a very nice steak tartare, if you like that sort of thing.”

  “Very much,” said Saint-Sylvestre, who loathed raw meat.

  “I live in Zurich, but I have a pied-a-terre in Aarau on the Delfterstrasse.”

  “Like the porcelain,” said Saint-Sylvestre, nodding toward the ornate display cabinet.

  “Ah, yes,” said Euhler, flushing a little. “A small hobby of mine.” He handed over the card: 42 Delfterstrasse, Apartment 709. “We can meet at the restaurant at seven, shall we say? Then perhaps go back to my place for a nightcap.”

  “Wonderful,” said Saint-Sylvestre. “I’ll see you at seven. We can continue our discussion.”

  “At the very least,” said Euhler, his round, grinning face eager.

  Carrot, hook, line and sinker; the only thing left was the stick.

  19

  After hiding the dugouts deep in the brush they went down the pathway to the big stone platform, then turned down a narrow path leading downward toward the distant bowl of the jungle floor. After fifty yards they reached the old portage point-a spindly tooth of rock, a knob worn by a thousand ropes used to lower dugouts to the course of the foaming river far below.

  A few feet away a huge iron ring had been spiked into the rock wall of the cliff, a testament to later travelers portaging downriver. They found several more pop cans here and a discarded running shoe, the canvas rotted away and the rubber sole smooth and full of ragged holes. Peggy paused to take a photo of the empty shoe and Holliday could see that the image was souring in his young cousin’s soul.

  “It never ends,” she said softly, looking out over the enormous expanse of the valley cut through by the dark artery of the river. “The whole continent is going to tear itself apart with genocide, corruption and greed. It really is the Dark Continent, not because the people are black but because no one from anywhere else can penetrate its heart.”

  “It’s like Afghanistan,” said Holliday, standing beside her. “I’ve often thought the best thing is just to leave places like that alone. They have their own laws, their own culture and their own way of life and we stole it all away and gave them Chicago Bulls T-shirts in return. They watch our television and see our lives and they can’t have them and it festers in them like a wound. That’s really why we have wars and revolutions-plain old envy.”

  “Pretty philosophical for an old soldier,” said Peggy.

  Holliday, his smile slight, answered her. “The first philosophical thought that comes into a warrior’s head might as well be his death warrant. Think about war and you can’t fight them anymore, because when you really think about war there’s no good reason to fight one.”

  “That’s a bit simplistic, isn’t it?” Peggy asked.

  “Wars are simple things, despite what politicians tell you. You want what the other guy wants. . Louis Vuitton jeans, Gucci handbags, gasoline, you name it and you’re willing to kill him to get it. Stealth fighters and nuclear submarines are hardly the tools of diplomacy; they’re the modern version of the Neanderthal club. The club makers want you to go to war so they can sell a lot of clubs, so they’re always whispering in your ear that their club’s better than the other guys’ and so on.”

  “But children?” Peggy said. “It’s obscene.”

  “Now who’s being simplistic?” said Holliday. “In the tenth century, twelve was considered the optimum age for marriage. In the Viking era if you were old enough to hold a sword and war shield you were a man. I bet this Waldo the Brain Smasher we’re following was no more than twenty. The average age of a kid fighting in Vietnam was nineteen or twenty, the average age for the guys fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan even younger.”

  “He speaks like this all the time?” Eddie asked Rafi as they came down the path.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Holliday said.

  “You sound like el Comandante giving one of his oraciones in the Plaza de la Revolucion in Havana.” The Cuban laughed. “People are given lunches and beer to listen to him for five, six hours sometimes. You could make, how you say, a comida, a picnic. He could talk forever, that man-embargo this, embargo that-embargo was el diablo himself. It was very funny, really.”

  “He means you’re doing it again, Doc,” said Rafi.

  “Doing what?”

  “Giving a lecture.” Peggy laughed. “You’re back at West Point in a class full of fourth-year ‘firsties’ laying down the law according to Lieutenant Colonel John ‘Doc’ Holliday, U.S. Army Ranger.”

  Doc laughed at himself. “I guess I was at that,” he said. It was true. He missed teaching, watching his kids get their chops together so maybe they could go out and fight the good fight and come out the other end intact, maybe thanks to him, even if it was only for a little bit of learning.

  They headed down the long, steep, winding path that led down the escarpment, the thunder of the falls booming on their left and the looming jungle wall on their right. Holliday could see the mural in the Templar tomb in his mind’s eye and wondered at the ethereal, slightly other worldly aura that the artist had seen a thousand years ago and that was just as visible now.

  When he was a kid he’d read Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and a strange, never very popular comic book called Turok, Son of Stone about two young Indians trapped in a valley of dinosaurs, and he had that strange feeling of the past and future somehow touching each other across the chasm of years, and not for the first time since beginning their expedition.

  As they all walked down the lowering path to the bottom of the valley he wondered for a moment if being left in that past might just be the best thing for him. Once upon a time it seemed that duty and honor had been part of life, as well as real pride in the things that he did well, but all that had gone, it seemed, and it didn’t look likely to reappear anytime soon.

  So what of Lucius Gellius Publicola, the disgraced general sent on a suicide mission to replenish Anthony’s war chest? Had he thought that great riches from this hidden jungle valley would buy his honor back? Or of Ragnar Skull Splitter and his men, making that same voyage nine hundred years later, looking for the treasure of the vanished Eighteenth Legion and its desperate, failed leader?

  And what of Roche-Guillaume, the Lost Templar, three hundred years after Ragnar, more a historian than a soldier-knig
ht, a man in many ways very much like him, given to philosophy and curiosity in equal parts? What had it been like to see and feel all these things, to climb out on that rocky slab above them now and see that timeless rainbow and wonder if it was leading him to the treasures of Solomon?

  And what if it was all no more than someone’s flight of fancy, Roche-Guillaume dreaming of the place he knew existed, but a place of failure he could not admit? What if they had all put themselves in potentially fatal harm’s way for no more than a fantasy from seven hundred years before?

  Eddie reached the bottom first with Holliday right behind him. There was a definite path where the child soldiers had pushed the dugouts through the tall grasses looking for a safer spot than directly beside the falls, and a second track, narrow and rough, probably used by animals.

  Leaves and branches were broken off knee-high and there were mounds of boar scat here and there. The child soldiers’ launch point was of no use to them, so Holliday took a few steps down the boar trail. He’d never actually run into one of the creatures before but he was damned glad they’d brought along a couple of the sharpened spears they’d made, not to mention Eddie’s gigantic knife.

  “You’d better come and see this, amigo,” said Eddie, stepping back from the base of the falls. He took Holliday’s elbow and pointed.

  “My God,” he whispered, feeling a rush of adrenaline slam into his heart and tears gather in the corners of his eyes. The past was coming up to welcome him.

  “What is it?” Rafi said as he and Peggy joined them.

  The symbols were carved almost an inch deep into a massive boulder thrown up by the falls aeons ago. Whoever had etched the symbols wanted them there forever.

  “They’re runes, an early form of Norse writing. It’s a ‘Kilroy was here’ from a thousand years ago. Our friend Ragnar Skull Splitter doing a little graffiti.”

  “Can you read them?” Eddie asked Holliday.

  “Only a couple. The one at the end is Thor, the Viking’s chief god; the one that looks like an R means journey. I think it’s some kind of prayer of thanksgiving for having made it this far.”

  “Amen to that,” said Eddie.

  “Arne Saknussemm,” whispered Holliday.

  “?Si!” Eddie grinned. “When I was a boy my father read this to me: Viaje al Centro de la Tierra! This Saknussemm, he was an alquimista?”

  “Alchemist.” Holliday nodded.

  Eddie pointed at the carvings on the black, wet rock. “Like those, I think-his carvings led the others to the center of the earth.”

  “Nice dad,” said Holliday. He couldn’t remember his own drunken father ever having read a book to him.

  “A nice man, yes,” said Eddie, wistfully.

  Rafi was beaming like a little kid. “It’s wonderful! The runes are absolute proof of my theory!” He ran his fingers into the deep indentations that had been carved into the dark stone. He turned to Peggy. “Take a picture,” he said eagerly. “This will put a few people’s noses out of joint back at the university.”

  Peggy dug her Nikon out of her pack and Rafi arranged himself proudly beside the deeply etched lettering, like an old photo of a man on a safari, his foot planted on the head of a dead animal.

  “For posterity.” Rafi grinned. “And for the pages of the Qedem article I’m going to publish.”

  “Maybe you should get Eddie into the picture, since he was the one who found it,” Holliday said. “Maybe give him some credit in the article as well.”

  “Uh, sure, that sounds good,” said Rafi, his face falling just a little bit. “Come on, Eddie; get in here.”

  “No, thank you, mi amigo, this is your thing. I do not want to interfere. It was only luck that I saw it.”

  “Are you sure?” Rafi said without much eagerness in his voice.

  “Absolutamente, I am sure.” The Cuban smiled.

  Peggy took several shots with Rafi in the frame and then a half dozen close shots, getting the sun shadows as deeply into the engraving on the stone as possible. When she was finished they turned back down the narrow old boar path heading deeper into the jungle, Rafi and Peggy in the lead.

  “You should have had your picture taken,” said Holliday. “You did find it first.”

  “Only an accident, Doctoro. It is for him, the adventure, the science of all this; let him have it. We are the lucky ones, after all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “For Rafi it is dates and kings and radiocarbon dating; for us it is the story, the narracion. Rafi writes it in his notebooks; we feel it in our hearts. It is both our joy and our tragedy, yes, this imagination, this romance?”

  “You should have been a poet, Eddie, not a soldier.”

  “All Cubans are poets, amigo.” The big man laughed sourly. “You have to be when they only pay you five pesos a week.”

  They walked on ahead until they saw Rafi and Peggy stopped in front of an area of scuffed and deeply scratched earth. There were a few cloven hoofprints and the tracks of small, bare human feet, as well. The cracked surface of the disturbed, dry ground indicated that it had recently been used as a mud wallow by the wild pigs that employed the path as a highway through the jungle. The children’s footprints were also indicative; they weren’t far behind the child soldiers.

  “Maybe we should turn off,” suggested Rafi.

  “The jungle’s too thick. This is no canopy rain forest. This is the only way for now.”

  They kept on moving through the morning hours, the trail leading blindly down to the river once or twice, probably to water the animals who used it, then veered away, heading back into the deeper jungle but always moving west. By noon it became too hot to walk and when the trail led down toward the river again they paused to rest for a few minutes.

  So far they hadn’t seen any sign of the child soldiers. They had dried food from the attacking team’s stores, but no one felt much like dehydrated beef Stroganoff or dried mac and cheese with “real” ground beef. Holliday let them light a small fire as long as the wood was tinderdry and smokeless, and Eddie went down to the river with his spear to try his luck again. Rafi slept, Holliday tended the fire and Peggy went looking for subjects to photograph.

  “Not too far,” warned Holliday, “we may have to bail in a rush.”

  “Yes, sir, boss.” Peggy grinned, with a mock salute.

  A few minutes later Holliday heard his cousin’s familiar laugh and a little while after that she reappeared, the Nikon over her shoulder and something cupped in her hands. Holliday poked at the fire with a twig to keep it burning and stood up.

  “What’ve you got there, kiddo?”

  “It’s a baby!” Peggy chortled. As Holliday approached her she opened her cupped hands and showed him what she’d found.

  “Oh, shit!” Holliday whispered.

  “What is it?” Peggy said, startled by his reaction.

  “Put it down!” The little creatures in her hand looked like a furry cross between guinea pigs and chipmunks.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re boar piglets and that means the mother’s around somewhere.”

  “But-”

  “Put them down! Now!” Peggy froze, Rafi woke up with a jerk and somewhere down the trail they heard a sound like a giant steam locomotive. An angry steam locomotive.

  Rafi stood up, blinking away sleep. “What the hell?”

  Suddenly the locomotive was making sounds like a hundred hammers striking stone and the sounds were getting closer. Eddie appeared, grinning proudly, a two-foot-long fish with a nose like an elephant held with three fingers of his left hand crammed into its gills, the spear that had impaled the scaleless creature in his right hand.

  The sow came down the trail from behind them, screeching her steam-engine cry at the top of her lungs, her sharp hooves pounding the dirt, her head high. The beast was black with traces of bristled rust at the shoulders and from where Holliday was standing he could swear the small angry eyes were as red as a demon’s. Peggy
stood frozen, eyes wide, staring at the furious mother of the infant piglets she held in her hands. It seemed incredible that the piglets and the massive mother were even of the same species.

  The mother rushed headlong at Peggy, at least two hundred and fifty pounds of toothy, infuriated horror, the muscles in her back bunched and ready to head off any move her quarry could make.

  Unlike the male of the species, the small horned female preferred to attack with her teeth and usually charged with her head high, looking for tender targets in the midsection, preferably stomach and groin.

  Holliday had about a three-quarter view. He hauled the handgun he’d taken from one of their dead attackers and fired, striking the creature somewhere in the belly. The enormous pig never even slowed. She was halfway across the clearing now and there was no time for a second shot. Peggy was still frozen on the spot, the piglets squealing in her hand, smelling the approaching sow.

  “Peggy!” Rafi bellowed, running toward her. Holliday made a running tackle, bowling Rafi out of harm’s way just as the elephant-nosed fish Eddie had been carrying flew through the air and struck the creature heavily on the side of the head. Stunned for a second she came to a lurching halt, looking around, roaring insanely.

  “?Hola!?El cerdo grande, cago en tu leche el gordota!?Por aqui!”

  The huge creature spotted Eddie, turned to him on her spindly legs and pawed the ground with her razor hooves. Eddie pointed the heavy spear toward the sow and made a lunging motion. The sow attacked, head high. Eddie waited until the last second, dropped to one knee, then pounded the blunt end of the spear into the ground at no more than a twenty-degree angle. He gripped the spear with both arms and tensed as the sow sprang forward, the end of the spear going under her raised snout and into the soft tissue of her chest. Eddie was bowled over onto his back but he managed to hang on to the spear. Squealing, the huge beast thrust herself toward Eddie, forcing her body down the pole, impaling herself even more horribly as she tried to bring her gnashing teeth to bear. She died, snorting and groaning weakly a few moments later, the beast’s hot blood pooling on the front of Eddie’s shirt, soaking it. The stink of the beast’s death odor was pungent.